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RPG Maker Contest - Xi and Crooked Bee win!

GOTY a.k.a. RPG MAKER contest


  • Total voters
    33

Crooked Bee

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I could kill the fairies consistently with
Pinning Shot. I was level 10 by then, might not be possible at lower levels.

I don't remember what level I was anymore. For me the problem was that the fairies acted faster than most of my characters did, and their special ability (which they'd always use on first turn) dealt up to 300 or so damage to the entire party. I just couldn't survive long enough to bring them down with Pinning Shot if there were more than one of them.
 

Niektory

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I don't remember what level I was anymore. For me the problem was that the fairies acted faster than most of my characters did, and their special ability (which they'd always use on first turn) dealt up to 300 or so damage to the entire party. I just couldn't survive long enough to bring them down with Pinning Shot if there were more than one of them.
There could be more than one of them? Haha I guess I was lucky.
 

Zed

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I would love to create a more serious entry relatively soon. I guess I don't need a contest to create one tho :P
 

Crooked Bee

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Some brief impressions of the more humorous entries:

Haha Xu Fugui's ski game is something to behold. :lol:

Loved the Deponia reference in Game Dev Soup.
:thumbsup:
The dialogue was funny, if a bit long-winded. I particularly enjoyed the MCA and Gaider bits. I wish Kirkbride and Levine had been more fleshed-out, Levine especially.
Also, I saved the flower! (So I actually got the ending I was supposed to.)

Broseph's game is nice. The Might and Magic reference was cool, and so was Name-Job-Bye. It's just that WCDS and the related themes isn't something that grabs me. I did, however, want to beat Dawkins :( Although I guess I'd need a different, more competent party for that!

Zed's game is such Codex circlejerk! And here I though my game was a circlejerk. Almost everyone makes an appearance, and it was fun getting all the events/references. Could farm potions ad infinitum in the Djinn tent as well as inside that log near saint's and calis' graves. Cut HHR's rope (sorry HHR). Laughed at the Roguey & Sawyer encounter.

Phew, well, this has been fun. :P

In the end, I'm gonna vote for Niektory, though Mastermind came close for me and Xi's game is obviously very well-made, too. Niektory's game is just the one that appeals the most to what I enjoy in RPGs these days.
 

Mastermind

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Crooked Bee
- Oh my god the Faeries! Any way you can defeat/avoid them? I did manage to kill the plant and quickly run away, but the encounter rate didn't let me do the same with the treasure chest. :(

I forgot how they are in that particular built. In the original built they were bugged and doing huge damage every turn to all your characters. Is that what's happening? Or are there a ton of them and they whittle your health away little by little while their evasion makes them impossible to hit? If it's the latter Gwen's Starfall is the best weapon against them. It ignores their magic defense altogether so if you're high enough level they'll all die in a couple of turns.

- I think that you should be able to run away from filler encounters. Once you're high-level enough, there's mostly no point to them apart from the stronger ones. Thanks to Rally and Bone Armor (both recover some HP), they don't deplete your HP/MP in any significant way either.

You can run away from trash encounters. Not sure how the game handles that exactly though. Press escape when your turn comes and the option should show up at least.

- Any point to the piercing resistance?

Spiders, hornets, bats and the two mysterious assailants do piercing damage. So does the Master's regular attack. Originally both bats and hornets would show up with large groups of slimes. I removed them because getting constantly poisoned so early in the game wasn't much fun.

- Sylvia has Prey so why give her an ability that improves her evasion? She isn't going to get hit anyway. And isn't Lure useless for her too, for the same reason?

Some enemy skills hit random enemies, and some multiple hit skills can be dodged, so it's still useful. Lure can be cast on any of the other party members, you don't have to (and probably shouldn't) use it on Sylvia. Sometimes Seth gets beaten down and you want to give him some breathing room from tanking. Vlad makes a decent tank, particularly against large groups of enemies since he has high health, can wear heavy armor and can use life steal to heal himself.

- Also I mostly just spammed Needling Array with Sylvia, although I must admit Pinning Shot also came in handy against Spectral Stalkers (who'd consistently evade Needling Array) and the final boss - that's good.

Needling array is good against unarmored enemies, due to the high number of shots (which is most enemes, for now). Spectral Stalkers have huge evasion (i think it's about 95%) so raw needling array is useless against them. Pinning shot damages evasion so it's helpful against high evasion characters (which is quite a few of them) because it lets other party members wail on them too. Leading shot is the best bet if you want to pick out high value targets though. It does a lot of damage per shot, and also does extra damage depending on the enemy's health.

- Is Amber's Fireside Dance (which shows the TP cost of 20 or so) also supposed to use MP? Because that was the impression I had. About 15 MP or so, iirc. It is also VERY strong against undead and spiders alike, to the point of almost being overpowered. Not by much, but maybe a little. Gwen's Meteor Hammer is also very powerful compared to other abilities that cost more or the same amount of TP/MP.

Both Fireside Dance and Meteor Hammer were very strong (I didn't have the time to test the game properly as I rushed to release something playable) so there's a lot of balance tweaks that need to be made. I've toned them both down somewhat. Fireside Dance doesn't do nearly as much damage anymore but it can set enemies on fire (many of amber's skills can now, and often they set her or the party on fire too).

Fireside Dance uses 15 mana too. The game just doesn't display it. I'd add it to the description but there's not much space there either.

- Why does "Mass Vampirism" only seem to target one character?
- If Seth is poisoned and you use Sin Eater, he dies. :(

Both of them are bugged. Sin Eater is supposed to poison Seth but I fucked up the state so instead of applying poison it applies death.

- I almost exclusively used Seth as a buffer - I'd have him use Rally every turn, with almost no exception. It's just too useful and lets you avoid almost any need for healing over the course of several encounters. Only very rarely (when the party was at almost full health/MP and enough TP) did I have him use Pendulum Strike. Rally helped me a lot in getting through the encounters without any trouble - perhaps too much so.

In the current build rally has a chance to remove his provocation, so every time you use it you risk losing his status as a tank, which can prove deadly for squishier party members. Mind you, you can always walk around looking for 1 slime encounters and use them to heal up your party but part of the nature of rpgmaker is that grinding can help you vault over every obstacle eventually. I might just make rally automatically remove provoke (which was how I originally envisioned it), though that might limit its usefulness to healing yourself on trash mobs.

- Vlad's Bone Armor is also so helpful that he only occasionally had the chance to use his other abilities.
- Constantine's Tactical Arrangement is a must-have no-brainer too.

The 3 starting skills are the only way (other than regular attacks) to build up TP and are meant to be used frequently. I make the earlier game more of a slug fest so the player gets used to the skills and what they do. In the public build there aren't all that many skills or opportunities that require you to use them, something I intend to change in the late game. I'm currently working on getting all the characters their base class skills (eventually they'll each be able to train up one of two subclasses, but I'll worry about that later). Amber's skill set is done and so is most of Seth's. If I feel that any character becomes too much of a one trick pony I'll modify (or replace altogether) some of their skills.

- Constantine's Cautious Assault remains active after the battle is over and may even carry over to the next one - is it supposed to be that way?

No, I'll fix it.

- All enemies, be it spiders or undead, poison you. I wish the status effects were more varied, though I suspect that's probably in the works.

Spiders, hornets, zombies and the two mysterious assailants poison you. Zombies are quite frequent so that's probably what gives the impression of too much poison. I added a ton of poison because poison is the easiest to manage of the health drain statuses. It goes away if you walk around for a bit and doesn't do much damage per turn. Wither is probably more common than poison among undead (and nastier too) but the undead who use it don't show up in random encounters outside of the library (and, I think, final boss). I wanted to get the player used to attrition. It was a lot more annoying back when poison would last indefinitely.

- Sylvia has the best damage AND she can hide in the shadows. That's one pretty overpowered fighter/rogue! Her Pinning Shot and Amber's Flaming Strike (or whatever it's called, I forget) allowed me to bring the final boss down in a few turns.

What level were you? If you grind enough you can probably one-shot the boss. If you spammed pinning shot he probably went down slower than he would have otherwise. 1 pinning shot followed by leading strikes will probably take him down even faster.

- What's the Flying status that Constantine receives when using Dive-By (iirc)?

Same effect as hiding (enemies don't target you often) and boosts evasion considerably. Drive-by will thus double up as a decent "fuck I'm losing" skill, and combo well with constantine's "ultimate" skill (which will be some manner of mass resurrection). Only lasts for 1 turn though.

- The rest point on the 1st floor was kinda pointless for me, since I had my HP almost at the max when I arrived there.

I'll have to make the game harder then. :p

I might just remove random encounters altogether (except for the world map, which isn't accessible). That'll limit the amount of experience you can get and thus make the early game at least easier to balance. Grinding to become a god then steamrolling the game is a time honored blobber tradition though, so I'm not sure I wanna do away with that altogether.

Anyway, thanks for playing and I'll definitely use your comments to make some adjustments.
 

Crooked Bee

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I was about lvl 9, iirc.

Also yeah, the Faeries were bugged. I guess I played the earlier version.
 

Mastermind

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I could kill the fairies consistently with
Pinning Shot. I was level 10 by then, might not be possible at lower levels.

I don't remember what level I was anymore. For me the problem was that the fairies acted faster than most of my characters did, and their special ability (which they'd always use on first turn) dealt up to 300 or so damage to the entire party. I just couldn't survive long enough to bring them down with Pinning Shot if there were more than one of them.

If they're doing 300 damage per shot then you have a bugged built (I got a nasty surprise too :p). Not sure if the one with bug fixes i added later fixes it. :M

Tested it again. I originally set them to just do 5 damage straight up. That morphed into some monster number then but works fine now (no idea what happened). using b.hp -= 5 should have the same effect but that now gets me a monster number instead. So I changed back to 5 and hope it doesn't screw up anymore.
 

Crooked Bee

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Oh and by the way, I never once used Seth's provoke ability - only Rally - and got on just fine without anyone dying (except one party member very early on). I guess you do need to make the game a bit harder. :P

Never felt the need to protect anyone against specific type of damage (like piercing) either. Same goes for what you said about Lure - never needed to do anything like that.
 

Zed

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you can farm all the secret potion stashes. it was an intentional bug because it was the last thing I added before I had to upload the game, and I didn't have time to fix it.
 

Xi

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I wonder if anyone would want to collaborate on a project? There are ways that you can divide up work load so that changes in one area don't mess with changes in another. (Plus I have a shit load of the DLC graphics/music packs - which I could share, but they'd only be good for that specific project) Thoughts?

Example:

One person designs the world map and towns, another designs dungeons and world map locations, and a third person designs/maintains the database. Could even use the forum to pin down story, characters/classes, monsters, items, balance, etc. Could also provide a kind of changelog for what each person adds/develops.

If you go into the Data folder on your project, you can divy up all of those little files as a work load. That way if one persons edits/changes it, another person doesn't do the same and copy over it. Also, you'd only have to upload the little file.
 
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Alchemist

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this was an impromptu contest just because the thingy was on sale.
Oh I know - and it was a great idea! I didn't mean to sound like I was complaining about the short notice. Just sayin' for next time one of these comes up... :)
 

felipepepe

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I wonder if anyone would want to collaborate on a project?
Cool ideia. I like working on the map design and story, but I'm incapable of numbers and stuffies, so all my games would be combat-less if I always worked alone... :roll:
 

Niektory

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OK, finished them all. I'm a slowpoke, yeah.
Among the finished games, I liked Crooked Bee's and Xu Fugui's the most. And both Xi's and Mastermind's have potential to be very good when completed.

So... I noticed that I messed up the ending C&C in best interplay fashion, the flower stomp slide and text are in but the flags to activate it just never made it so whatever you do that's the same.
:negative:
The romance is also broken. But that's fine, I read it in the editor.
Now I'll have to play Dragon Age 3...

I would love to create a more serious entry relatively soon. I guess I don't need a contest to create one tho :P
Do it. I'll enjoy watching you working. And sweating.

Mastermind
I pretty much agree with all CB said. I think combat-only healing skills are a bad idea, it's hard to resist exploiting them by leaving one enemy alive. And I'm not a fan of random encounters, I prefer hand-placed battles. These can be respawnable too if you want. And if they stay, a little more variety would help, I was getting one zombies+skeletons encounter over and over again and it was getting repetitive.
 

Mastermind

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Yesterday I changed the leveling system. You no longer gain stats upon leveling (except health/mana, which were reduced). The only way to gain stats will be from exploring (like finding statues for Vlad to talk with), the gear you're wearing, and possibly quests. This should make balancing encounters a lot easier.

With regards to Rally, I can't think of a way to keep it a free skill and not just have it turn into a "heal and restore the mana of the entire party" type exploit. I've made Cover a basic skill instead (and will reduce its duration to 1 turn). Rally will become a more advanced skill and require TP to use. It also won't do anything for Seth himself.

Mastermind
I pretty much agree with all CB said. I think combat-only healing skills are a bad idea, it's hard to resist exploiting them by leaving one enemy alive. And I'm not a fan of random encounters, I prefer hand-placed battles. These can be respawnable too if you want. And if they stay, a little more variety would help, I was getting one zombies+skeletons encounter over and over again and it was getting repetitive.

There is variety, it's just that most of the non-zombie/skeleton encounters are limited to certain areas whereas the zombie/skeleton ambushes are the only ones that show up in non-unique ones. I thought making their spawn rate fairly rare would make it feel less boring. I'll add more variety for the next build, which won't be out for a while. I don't want to ask people to play through it a hundred times because odds are they'll just get bored so the next time it'll be considerably different and (hopefully) have a good template set for the rest of the game.
 

Crooked Bee

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You could also give Rally to someone else. Someone who also has indispensable attack skills, like Gwen or Amber, or someone like Vlad (so you'd have to choose between that and Bone Shield or w/e it's called); that way it'd be much less optimal to just use it every turn. Making it cost at least some TP is a good idea, too.
 

Ranselknulf

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What's the password to cleve's bunker?

I tried a few release dates but nothing seemed to work.

The only thing I can think of is the B..y ..at message in the game refers to the password in some way.. but I have no idea what that means.
 

Mastermind

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What's the password to cleve's bunker?

I tried a few release dates but nothing seemed to work.

The only thing I can think of is the B..y ..at message in the game refers to the password in some way.. but I have no idea what that means.

The hint is in the newspaper
 

Crooked Bee

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What's the password to cleve's bunker?

I tried a few release dates but nothing seemed to work.

The only thing I can think of is the B..y ..at message in the game refers to the password in some way.. but I have no idea what that means.

"B..y ..at" is a false lead. The real answer is an old Codex lore check, and the hints are in the newspaper as well as the terminal's message requesting the "unlock code".

Does the phrase "XXXX Unlock Code" ring a bell?

It's FATE Unlock Code (FATE = 3283)
The newspaper hint is, "Neanderthals become masters of FATE"

Also, since I assume everyone who wanted has already played my "game", here's a round-up of all the minor branching and different endings you can get:

Minor branching:
- defeat commie or not (changes some dialogue)
- choose to wait outside or get into the bunker as commie (you can explore the bunker a bit + it kind of wraps up the commie cameo)

Endings:
- defeated by Brenda
- teleported out of Brenda's room
- confronted Sirotek
- Neanderthal Sense endings:
--- used Neanderthal Sense too many times in the hallway of Sirotek's bunker
--- lava room
 
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Zed

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*PUSHES CROOKED BEE AWAY*

contest is over!
now everybody has a vote.
we're all winners!!!
just kidding.
Crooked Bee won!

*DRAGS CROOKED BEE BACK*

CONGRATULATIONS!!!
you may give youself a gog game or whatever you guys put up as a prize.

cya next year plebs!

keep an eye out for the jury's prize.

Thumbs_21.gif
post-6001-0-24321600-1397230187.gif
congratulations-41-80891.gif
congratulations004.gif
 

Crooked Bee

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Oh. my. god. A whopping 11 people voted for me, so that must mean I won the popular vote!!

Thanks goes to everyone who enjoyed my first effort at vidya game development :) (With special thanks to Cleveland Mark Blakemore for timeless inspiration)

Now all that's left is for eric_s to post his knowledgeable analysis in this thread (or PM me with it) so I can make a front page post!
 

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